Summer Stelter remembers being in “a rough place” in 2022. Diagnosed years earlier with borderline personality disorder and complex posttraumatic stress disorder, she was told throughout childhood that she was lazy, unmotivated, sometimes even frightening — traits that are inconsistent with her life today as a successful business owner. Yet when a conflict arose with her son’s elementary school about his academic struggles, it triggered her PTSD, giving her flashbacks and rekindling past suicidal thoughts.
“I was filled with shame and guilt for not living up to everyone’s standards,” Stelter said. “I was my biggest bully, telling myself I was stupid, that I can’t get this, and what’s the purpose of living?”
Then a colleague suggested she look into All Brains Belong VT. The small, nonprofit medical practice in Montpelier specializes in neurodivergent patients, or the one in five people who think, learn, communicate and experience the world differently. In April 2023, the practice diagnosed the then-38-year-old Irasburg woman with autism.
“From my very first medical appointment, I was blown away,” she recalled. “I was in tears. I found hope. This is what I’ve been searching for my whole life.”
At All Brains Belong, Stelter found more than just clinicians who understood and respected her diagnoses. She also found a community of like-minded patients who meet regularly to share their experiences of being neurodivergent and the tools they use to manage it. Some patients travel from as far away as Brattleboro to participate.
“This is what I’ve been searching for my whole life.” Summer Stelter
All Brains Belong also hosts community programs for neurodivergent children and teens, and it produces weekly webinars and educational materials for parents, caregivers, employers and health care practitioners to better serve the neurodivergent population and those with traumatic brain injuries. Nearly all are free and open to anyone regardless of where they live, even patients and medical professionals unaffiliated with the practice. Some of the online materials have been downloaded more than 20,000 times by people around the world.
“People don’t just join a medical practice. They are joining a community,” said Dr. Melissa “Mel” Houser, 41, who founded All Brains Belong in November 2021. The Long Island native moved to Vermont in 2008 to attend the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine. Though she described her medical education as “excellent,” it included almost nothing about neurodiversity beyond a one-hour lecture on autism. The lesson focused entirely on the red flags for recognizing autism, such as an inability to display emotions, read social cues, make eye contact or communicate well verbally.
Because such characteristics apply to only a small percentage of people with autism, Houser said, she often missed signs of autism and other neurodivergence in her patients — and herself.
At age 37, Houser experienced what she called “autistic burnout,” a state of severe mental and physical exhaustion caused by stress, overstimulation and not having her autistic needs met for long periods of time. When someone is in autistic burnout, she explained, they can temporarily lose skills. In her case, Houser lost the ability to camouflage her autistic traits, a safety-seeking mechanism she wasn’t even aware she was doing to fit in socially.
Houser had never suspected she was autistic. She learned later that 80 percent of women with autism are diagnosed in adulthood. Many are considered “high-functioning,” with neurodivergence that flew under the radar of medical providers for years.
“I was trained in the stereotypes,” she said, “and I did not fit those stereotypes.”
Houser now describes herself as “openly neurodivergent.” In addition to her autism, she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; dyslexia; dyspraxia, or difficulties with motor skills, balance and coordination; and dyscalculia, or trouble learning and understanding math.
When discussing such conditions with patients, Houser uses whatever terms they prefer. However, she eschews the expressions “on the spectrum,” which she considers euphemistic, and “autism spectrum disorder,” because she believes autism is a brain difference to be accommodated, not a dysfunction that needs fixing.
Located behind Montpelier City Hall, All Brains Belong doesn’t look or feel like a conventional medical office. In the waiting room there are fidget spinners — small, spinning toys that can help relieve nervous energy, stress or anxiety — but no ticking clocks or fluorescent lights, both of which can upset some autistic patients. Aside from a centrifuge on one counter for processing blood samples, one could easily mistake the space for a therapist’s office.
Such aesthetic choices were deliberate. As Houser explained, All Brains Belong serves a population whose medical needs were not being adequately met by the traditional, one-size-fits-all health care system. Many patients report that their previous providers dismissed their complaints as trivial or imaginary.
If her office were to invoke memories of past medical environments where a patient felt unsafe or unwelcome, Houser said, it could trigger a nervous system response. Some neurodivergent patients lose executive functions, such as the ability to speak or remember what ailments they came in to discuss.
By the time patients find All Brains Belong, she said, it’s not uncommon for them to have as many as 40 diagnoses, most of them related to mental health. Among the most common are anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“It makes no sense that a person would have 40 things wrong with them,” Houser said. “It’s just that the health care system is not set up for a practitioner to zoom out, because you’re only giving [patients] 10 to 15 minutes.” For comparison, All Brains Belong schedules patient visits of at least 30 minutes; some run 90 minutes or more.
Invariably, new patients also report long-standing physical ailments, such as chronic pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, disrupted sleep and irritable bowel syndrome. While Houser was familiar with the research showing that these conditions are more prevalent among people with autism and ADHD, she had no idea they would dominate her practice. She has since identified a constellation of intertwined conditions present in 97 percent of her patients. She called that discovery “the biggest surprise of my whole All Brains Belong journey.”
Why was All Brains Belong established as a nonprofit? Houser said it never occurred to her to do it any other way.
“In my mind, the nonprofit sector is all about community-driven problem-solving,” she said. “And that’s what we do here.” The practice accepts Medicare, Medicaid and all of Vermont’s major health insurance providers. It also supplements its income through grants and tax-deductible donations.
A year before launching All Brains Belong, Houser and her team set up community focus groups to discuss what’s wrong with traditional health care, then built a new model based on their findings. Three years later, the focus groups still meet several times a year. They conduct patient surveys, do one-on-one interviews and even pay people for their feedback.
In her previous medical practice, Houser noticed that much of her time with patients was spent trying to solve problems that existed outside the exam room.
“You’re never going to get healthy if you’re lonely, if you’re having trouble accessing your education, if you’re getting bullied in school, if you’re an adult and can’t hold a job,” she said. “Those things are all part of health.”
Two weeks after getting her own autism diagnosis, Houser read a statistic that terrified her: People with autism are more likely to die prematurely, with an average life expectancy range of 36 to 54 years. Those people aren’t dying from autism itself, she noted, but from conditions such as premature cardiovascular disease and suicide that are closely associated with social isolation.
“How come I didn’t know this? How come none of my colleagues knew this?” she asked. Houser called it “a gaping hole in health care delivery” — a hole she aimed to fill.
If people with autism suffer from higher rates of isolation, she concluded, All Brains Belong would focus on providing not just quality medical care but also strong social connections.
“The most important thing we do is connect patients with other patients,” she said. “When they hear their own stories reflected back to them, there’s something so transformative about that.”
That was Stelter’s experience. Soon after joining the practice, she began attending group appointments, supervised by medical staff, where patients share such challenges as managing meds, relieving pain and falling asleep.
“I was like, Oh, my gosh! I feel the same way!” she said. “I’ve connected with people all over the world who are just like me.”
Debra Ann Pinsof-DePillis of Montpelier joined All Brains Belong soon after her son, Roo, was diagnosed with autism at 4. A bright and curious boy, Roo, now 8, doesn’t present like a stereotypical autistic child, his mother said. He reads above his grade level, communicates well with adults and has a diverse set of interests, from soccer to weather forecasting.
“The day he asked me, ‘How do they make petroleum?’ I knew I was in over my head,” she said with a laugh.
But Roo also has trouble making friends at school. So his family joined All Brains Belong on its non-primary-care track. Pinsof-DePillis and her husband have another primary care physician for routine visits and urgent care. But their family, whose members are all neurodivergent, uses All Brains Belong for the educational and social programs.
Pinsof-DePillis attends group visits where she learns about supplements that will help their brains and how to improve her sleep. Roo joined Kid Connections, where he meets other neurodivergent children with shared interests. He’s made a few close friends through All Brains Belong.
“As a mom, I think I’m the only parent in the world experiencing what I am experiencing and my son is experiencing,” Pinsof-DePillis said. Whenever she attends Brain Club, a free, weekly online educational program about neurodiversity, there’s always an aha moment when she learns something new.
“When I think of community and I need support, this is where I go,” she said.
All Brains Belong is also focused on making neurodiversity part of employers’ diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Last year, Houser and Sierra Miller, All Brains Belong’s nurse practitioner, trained 2,500 employers on creating more neuro-inclusive workplaces. They covered such issues as employee onboarding, performance problems and evaluations, and how assistive technologies can help workers with ADHD and autism.
“We weren’t thinking about any of that stuff,” said Blake Sturcke, co-CEO at Encore Renewable Energy in Burlington. “When we became aware of this training, it was immediately something that we were super interested in.”
Sturcke said the neurodiversity training gave him and his colleagues a much better understanding of how people’s brains access, process and interpret information differently. Some employees do better with emails than phone or video calls because it gives them time to process and digest information at their own pace.
“Expanding the aperture of that lens,” he said, “was really beneficial for us.”
Now capped at 350 patients, All Brains Belong is too small to serve all the people who seek its services. The practice filled up within six weeks of opening, then added a nurse practitioner, filled up again and finally closed its waiting list. Houser expects to hire another practitioner soon and accommodate another 100 patients by year’s end. Nevertheless, she is averse to growing too quickly because it would mean her current patients might have to wait months for an appointment.
For this reason, All Brains Belong provides free educational opportunities and training materials to other medical providers. The goal is to help local clinicians adopt a new model of community-driven health care, one that’s designed and shaped largely by patients themselves.
It’s worth noting that many highly successful people involved in designing and reimagining systems — from Leonardo da Vinci and Henry Ford to Temple Grandin and Elon Musk — were suspected or are known to be autistic. Houser is convinced that she conceived of All Brains Belong’s new approach to health care not in spite of her neurodivergence but because of it.
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or text VT to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Trained counselors are available 24-7.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Meeting of Minds | All Brains Belong provides neurodivergent people with health care, education and social connections”
This article appears in The Wellness Issue 2025.
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